This Winter Horse Trade and EXIT Theatre return to bring you a festival that is uncensored, unjuried and totally downtown.
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This Winter Horse Trade and EXIT Theatre return to bring you a festival that is uncensored, unjuried and totally downtown.
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A quixotic pilgrimage to India. Slightly misguided adventures into drugs, sickness, and delusion. H.R. Britton recounts his humorous, and increasingly anxious tale from the Subcontinent.
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His long graceful hands draw pictures in the air, and his flexible voice captures dozens of characters in just a few words. Within minutes of the start of the story everyone is cracking up, and continues to laugh for the next 75 minutes.
... [a] modern day Sheherazade.
- Gogh Gurl
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Raised in Wisconsin, H.R. Britton has been telling stories in NYC for nearly a decade. He gravitates towards the anxiously comic, both in hisoriginal monologues and his literary adaptations. "Jesus Rant" (2007) is a series of serio-comic ravings about his religious upbringing. "From Madison to Madurai" (2006) is a previous wide-eyed, yet wry look at his pilgrimage to the East. He hosts and curates Lower East Side Stories at the Tenement Museum. And with Rajeev Varma, he co-hosts Tammany Mondays at the Huron Club at the SoHo Playhouse. |
Rajeev Varma: Director Rajeev Varma is an experienced writer, director, producer and actor from New Zealand. He is a co-creator, and performer of the internationally acclaimed solo play "D'Arranged Marriage," which has played to sold out houses in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and New York. |
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BackStage Critic’s Pick Review for “Jesus Rant” (2007)
Jesus Rant: The Religio-Comic Ravings of a Former Christian
August 20, 2007
Reviewed by A.J. Mell
H.R. Britton's one-man show is not the angry screed suggested by the title; it's a thoughtful examination of how one man's intellectual growth led to personal liberation, even as it put some strain on his family relationships.
An engaging storyteller with an ascetic face and just-rolled-out-of-bed casualness, Britton was raised on a Wisconsin farm by a fundamentalist family prone to Yuletide readings of the gorier passages from Revelation. He examines his beliefs largely through the prism of an uneasy relationship with his grandfather, a kind of spiritual mentor whose cruelly judgmental ways alienate Britton from the religion of his youth. His ultimate solution is to reject religion per se and focus on Jesus' ethical teachings -- an approach also taken by Thomas Jefferson, who, as the author reminds us, literally took a pair of scissors to his copy of the Bible and cut out all the supernatural bits.
As directed by Maia Garrison, there's nothing arty or esoteric about Jesus Rant -- just one honest, likable guy telling his story with unaffected simplicity.
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